That being said, I do acknowledge said English reader’s concerns about ensuring legacy behaviour not be broken. And turns out, there is another Github issue related to this topic, which talks about making autospace a separate property rather than a value in text-spacing.Īs I went through all the comments in the first issue, I was rather surprised at this comment made by “an English reader who has a bare acquaintance with Chinese text”, who mentions that he “had two professionals who come from journalism tell me that removing spacing looks better, with adding spaces being reserved for special use cases.”. So I also wondered out loud how plausible it would be for the browser to automatically adjust the width of the manually added spaces.

The thing is, the amount of space that U+0020 adds is a little too much.

I did share my experience with Shopify’s Chinese language websites (we have 4 of them!), whereby the content guidelines for authors was to have manually add the spaces via U+0020 for whenever our Chinese text finds itself adjacent to an English word. And also, what the default behaviour of the text-spacing property ought to be. For the most part, we discussed the amount of spacing required (1/4em versus 1/8em). The purpose of our task force is to have a comprehensive requirements document for browser implementers to better understand what the ideal presentation of the Chinese script on the web and digital media should be.Īnd so, when we saw this issue being raised in the CSS Working Group Github repository on text-spacing behaviour, we discussed it during our monthly call. 字型散步（柯志杰 & 蘇煒翔）汉字复兴的脚步（许寿椿）创字录:字体设计必修课（吴剑）Īdmittedly, because there is no official guidance on this, there are also situations where there is no space between Han and non-Han characters. The examples below are literally books I pulled out of my bookshelf. For the most part, whenever there is a mix of Han characters with other scripts, we would want some extra spacing between them.Įven though this is not explicitly documented in any national standards or guidelines, those of us who read Chinese have often seen that extra space in printed publications. The first thing was a discussion around spacing between Han characters and non-Han characters. There were a number of interesting things discussed in the most recent one, enough for me to want to write about them.

I’m currently a member of the Chinese Text Layout Task Force | 中文排版需求, and we have monthly calls to discuss issues and work related to the Requirements for Chinese Text Layout.

Chinese style font in word